In its biggest lead in five years, NBC has a commanding spot in the key 18-49 adult demographic eight weeks into the fall TV season. “NBC is rolling,” says Zenith Media Services analyst Roy Rothstein. He says NBC’s Thursday night lineup is helping to lead the way in key demographics and the network is getting help from other strong showings in other key demographics. This season, NBC’s 4.9 Nielsen rating and 13 share – representing an audience of 6.3 million in adults 18-49 – is ahead of its nearest competitor, CBS, and slightly more than that ahead of ABC and Fox. CBS has a 4.1 rating and 11 share among adults 18-49, ahead of ABC’s 3.9 rating and 10 share and Fox’s 3.8 rating and 10 share. The WB – which targets 12-34 even though the Nielsen ratings go higher than that – has a 2.1 rating and a 5 share and UPN has a 1.8 rating and a 5 share. It’s much the same story with adults 25-54, with NBC’s 5.5 rating and 13 share giving it the slight edge in season-to-date. CBS has a 5.0 rating and a 12 share, followed by ABC’s 4.3 rating and 10 share and Fox’s 4.0 rating and 10 share. The WB has a 2.0 rating and a 5 share and UPN has a 1.8 rating and a 4 share. “They’re obviously having a great Thursday night,” Rothstein says of NBC. CSI is the top-rated show in Nielsen household ratings, but Friends and ER this week took the top two spots in 18-49 for the seventh time in eight weeks. Friends reeled in a 12.1 rating and 31 share among adults 18-49 to make it the demographic’s top-rated program. (It also led in adults 18-34, adults 25-54 and adult-female demos). Friends’ lead-out program, Scrubs, retained 84% of the audience with a 10.2 rating. Rothstein says NBC has got to be happy with the sophomore sitcom’s performance on Thursday nights. “It’s a pretty minor dropoff considering where they are,” he says. NBC says last week’s Scrubs episode had the strongest 18-49 retention in almost two years of any show following Friends other than another Friends episode. Rothstein says last week’s Frasier and its follow-on show, Hidden Hills, turned in strong numbers for NBC’s Tuesday and Monday’s performance of Fear Factor gave NBC’s two later shows, Third Watch and Crossing Jordan, a boost. ABC’s first two weeks of the sweeps saw it go up 3% with strong weekly ratings and good ratings for not only Monday Night Football but also its Tuesday night comedy block and news magazine interviews with the Osbournes and Jennifer Lopez.
Cross-platform advertising opportunities continue to get large amounts of attention, as they did at Tuesday’s International Radio & Television Society Foundation in New York Tuesday. There may be some debate as to whether they are more buzz than business, but it appears these mind-boggling deals are here to stay. “At Viacom, it’s now not a matter of if cross-platform, it’s a question of when,” said Lisa McCarthy, senior VP of Viacom Plus. Perhaps one of the best examples, Viacom spent billions of dollars in the past five years amassing a multi-media giant, capped by its June 2000 purchase of CBS, Inc. Today, it bills roughly $1 billion in cross-media sales, stretching from its TV and cable assets, to outdoor and radio, plus its Blockbuster Video stores. The result is that Viacom is taking a bigger share of the advertising marketplace. “We’re getting more money. In every single deal we have gotten more volume.” When Viacom Plus broke ground in May 2001 with its first of its kind $300 million cross-platform deal with Procter & Gamble, it was the sole player in the multimedia game. Today, ABC/Disney, AOL Time Warner, Clear Channel, and others have formed organizations charged with selling advertisers a spectrum of media. The result, said Mediacom EVP/director of national and local broadcast Donna Speciale, is a better bottom line for buyers. “These were not formed to be cheaper. When Viacom Plus was formed that was not the reason Mel Karmazin put all his assets together. It has become all about that though, because now there is more competition.” That is critical, said Zenith Media EVP, director of local media Bonita LeFlore, because clients are more bottom line focused than ever. “If a proposal doesn’t have a return on investment on it, we can’t even look at it.” While Time, Inc. and America Online have been exploring cross-platform ad deals under the AOL Time Warner umbrella, its Global Marketing Solutions unit was formed especially to push deals on a larger scale – including with media outside AOLTW. “This is a market in transformation. As you look around the media landscape, ratings, readers and users are harder than ever to get to,” observed GMS president Michael Kelly. “The slam dunk media deals are no longer available and advertisers are looking at new ideas.” Among the upsides, said Kelly, is that advertisers are moving money that was once in the marketing budget to advertising. With that shift, however, comes more work for agencies that are designed for a more traditional model of planning and buying. All that added work is less about choice, and more about necessity, said Clear Channel Advantage senior VP Lori Wellinghoff, who said advertiser’s mission of connecting with consumers has become more complicated. “I think cross-platform is making it easier. When you have a consumer that is active, distracted, jaded, diverse, you can’t just buy a national television spot and have that be as effective. It may be cost-effective, but it’s just not that simple any more.” Clear Channel Advantage, with a large stable of radio and outdoor assets among others, aims to push itself as the outside the home cross-platform shop. So much so, it’s trademarked the phrase, “gone from home.” One big issue that still needs sorting out is how cross-platform ad deals will be measured. “We are buying the media anyway, so we can evaluate the media based on its merits and its value,” said Initiative Media EVP, director, national broadcast Tim Spengler. Citing one cross-platform buy his agency did for Home Depot, Spengler said they went into it simply feeling confident in the campaign that was created, and accepted there is no “scientific way” to measure success. “The sum of the parts was much greater than the whole from the extra exposure we got,” said Spengler. Yet for all of its rave accolades, there are still those who believe cross-platform is just the optimizer of the new millennium. “The buzz is a little more than what’s happening,” said Speciale. While saying that she is a firm “believer” in its potential, Speciale said many of the most-hyped cross-platform deals have been nothing more than “volume deals” aggregating a greater amount of media spending across one company’s assets. “This new buzz is very interesting because we’ve all been doing this for sometime,” said LeFlore. Yet she and most others believe advertisers will help turn the buzz into business once they have more insight into why cross-media can work. AOL Time Warner’s Mike Kelly agreed. “These are so difficult to do that one of the reasons we haven’t seen more of these deals is that we haven’t done a good enough job convincing clients that there’s something clearly an advantage of having gone down this road.” “We haven’t done enough convincing of clients that there’s value to do this,” continued Spengler. The way he sees it, the main selling point is how that will impact the agency’s relationship. “It allows us to get closer to our clients and get involved with them earlier in the process.” As more advertisers put their marketing burden on their media buyers, he said that would become an increasingly convincing argument.
The future of entertainment looks digital, and World Theatre Inc. wants to be a big part of it. Imagine selecting and buying billboards, high-resolution plasma screens, and movie ads by daypart, and then being able to upload creative and send it to roadsides and theater screens worldwide. And imagine having a mechanism for easy consumer response. It’s a future that may happen within the next year or two. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company — which also has offices on West 57th Street in Manhattan next to Carnegie Hall — is working on that future through intensive research and development efforts. It’s starting to pay off in the form of a patent pending at the U.S. Patent Office and buzz in two industries, one that hasn’t seen a lot of change in the past few decades and another that is trying to decide how best to go digital. How (and how fast) that transition takes place will affect World Theatre’s success in the management and delivery of digital film and advertisements. Another big initiative is the creation of a 24-hour digitally interactive music TV network, supported by more than just advertising and e-commerce. “We see ourselves expanding the market for digital entertainment and advertising,” says Robert D. Summer, World Theatre’s chairman and chief executive officer and the former head of RCA Records and Sony Music International. That begins with billboards and movie screens, but it doesn’t stop there. Plans include expanding into interactive TV, cell phones, and other consumer electronics platforms, says executive vice president Randy Daniel. “Our plan is to build out an infrastructure that advertisers can begin to [use to] build a relationship with their consumers.” A key part of the equation, still to be approved by the U.S. Patent Office, is a mechanism within the advertising that will let a consumer easily reply to messages, so that advertisers can tailor a response and track metrics beyond what’s available now. Because it’s still in the Patent Office pipeline, World Theatre executives hesitate to disclose too much. But they say it will radically change the way people look at and respond to advertising. “It will allow all advertisers across all media to become interactive without any impact on the media itself,” says Skip Ballou, executive vice president of business development. The system will be “media agnostic,” meaning it will work via a consumer’s cell phone, TV remote control, or PDA. “In the future, merchandisers will no longer be satisfied with simply branding messages. This will allow consumers to request more information on a company, buy on impulse, and give feedback. But so far, the film industry hasn’t committed to digital entertainment as much as it could. Filmmakers want screen operators to switch as soon as possible, since it would give them more flexibility and room for creativity. But many of the nation’s 35,000 screen operators are resisting because of the expense.
Radio continues to log big sales increases, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. It's count of revenue figures soared 17% in September 2002, the highest growth rate of any month since May of 2000 when radio hit its top end with an increase of 25% at the peak of an overall economic and advertising zenith. The 17% combined local and national ad sales increase for September of 2002 over the same month a year ago was mirrored in the growth of both the national and local sectors. For the month of September, national ad dollars skyrocketed 26% and local figures jumped 14%, when compared to September of 2001. Radio's Q3 numbers also showed an overall gains. National numbers climbed 17% over the same quarter last year and local dollars escalated 8%. The combined total for Q3 Quarter of 2002 was up 10%. On a year-to-date basis, national dollars rose 9% for the first nine months of the year, while local ad sales achieved a 3% increase. The combined total for January through September was up 4%. To put the intermediate and long-term growth of the industry into perspective, RAB introduced a Sales Index that equates base year 1998 to 100. For September, the national monthly sales index for Radio was 127.6. The local index was 129.7 for a combined total of 129.2. Looking at the year-to-date figures, the sales index showed national at 133.3; local at 134.1; and the combined total at 133.9. Gary Fries, President and Chief Executive Officer of the RAB said the strong growth will continue "and the next two quarters are shaping up for sustained health in the industry.”